Twitter is good because
- lots of people use it
- i have a lot of followers
- i can track interesting people and events
- it is social media
Twitter fails because
- it is unreliable
- their servers cannot handle the load
- they are doing something wrong
- it is broken
- the company is not really a company at all, it's a bunch of smart kids
Twitter will fly away because
- it fails
- they are not partnering with the right folks if they are still failing
- google doesn't need to buy them
- a tweet may be unique to twitter, but the micro-blog format is nothing special, just a feed
- yammer.com replicated their business model in a couple of weeks
- it's nothing special
- aggregation of our social media bits and bytes is the uber play
- friendfeed does twitter better than twitter, the tweet is an afterthought limited to 140 characters
What better way to make a newbie socialite salivate than teasing me with new followers.

twitter-new follower request
And the joke continues to be on me.

twitter-deleted account
But I think the real joke is that the Tweet Folks can't figure it out. This has been an issue for about 2 months.
And Biz Stone kept saying at the TWITLIVE conference last week, "Now that Al3x is full-time…" As if now we should have confidence that sending stuff directly to alex's email is going to result in speedy and efficient fixes. And I'm thinking… "they just got 15 mil in new investment and they brought on ONE FTE to manage the morass?" I guess they wanted to put a lot of it in investments while they are hedging their bets and putting off upgrading the servers.
But, of course, I have no idea what I'm talking about. Except this:

friendfeed - profile + services
Now if we can just get an OPEN ID and OPEN MESH system in place. (Calling Mark Cantor, calling Mark Cantor!)
And…

twitter-timeout error
@jmacofearth
permalink: http://bit.ly/fail-whale
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And now enjoy some fail whale humor from other sites.
The fail whale widget.
An interview with Yiying Lu the fail whale artist.



